Bouncing stems. The most effecient way for my mixing engineer?

bouncecouncil

New Member
Joined
Dec 6, 2013
Im new to house and sending out stems for mixing engineers. For the life of me, I can't mix synths, so I'm going to be contracting outside mixing engineers to do the dirty. Now, before I print each track lane, I have a few questions for mixing engineers in hopes to optimize the time it takes one to mix down my songs:

1) Side chain compression synths: for the pumping synths activated by the kick, should I apply the SCC to each synth and print each on its own stem or should I leave their levels unaffected and let the engineer have at it?

2) Daft punk band pass, hpf, and lpf effects:
During intros and bridges, ill bandpass, lp, or, hp a synth (similar to daft punk's Ino Silver Club)). Will applying this technique to my stems affect a mixing engineer's ability to eq said tracks?

3) Reverb - Wet in, Dry out:
Avicii and similar "good feeling house" producers use a technique where just before a phrase-change or at the end of a buildup, they'll lower the volume of a synth's dry while raising its reverb. It gives off the effect that a synth is moving deeper/ farther away into it's reverb. Is it better to send the wet stem and dry stem separately or combine them for an overall eq'ng to be done by mixing engineer.

And finally

4) Shared reverbs, shared delays, shared doubler sends... and their stems:
If I use one reverb plugin to create subtle ambience reverb for gelling together my percussions, is it better to A) print stems for each instrument, then a reverb stem for each instrument; or B) print stems for each instrument, then print one reverb stem containing all the percussions' rvb send.
And if a synth pluck has a delay track, do I print both as one stem. Or do I print wet and dry separately (i ask this, thinking the engineer may later need to chop up the delay stem to maybe adjust their pan widths)

Very creative with the language of music. Very noob with the science of mixing. Appreciate your wisdoms.
 
hey man, big ups if you wanna do that/can afford one,but isnt that what it is all about?Imagine if you start mixing yourself and after a while when you will be able to do your own mixdowns how much better it will feel,and it will give you invaluable knowledge and experience that are going to improve your productions alltogether.
Dont get me wrong this is my opinion anyways, and if the engineer is a pro you will have a pretty decent mix,no doubt about that.
 
All really good questions that I don't have the answer for because as an amateur producer I wana do my own mixdowns. it sounds like you need to just stick at it man, it takes years to get a good mixdown but its not impossible, obviously.
 
Im kind of a reverse engineering kind of person. I did it the same way with my hip hop productions. Composed using my most used sounds, sent out the stems, got backed the mixed versions as well as mastered versions. Then I'd go back and a/b the mixes and masters while going over my raw sessions and learned from there. Im definitely not going to send out my catalogue for mixing and mastering, just 5 tops. Then its back to the lab for some mad scientist studying.

my questions here werent exactly answered yet, but the next step is finding some mix engineers....
 
What's so difficult about A/B your tracks to professional releases of a similar sub genre?
 
Your best bet is to call him and ask how he'd prefer it done, this accomplishes two things: One, it answers your question, two the engineer will put forth the effort to make your mix top-man because you respected him and wanted his input on how best to do things. Give respect, get it back.
 
If he or she is mixing, you want to be sending multi-tracks not stems. Or effect processed stereo interleaved "tracks" if they are
an integral part of the production sound.

Stems are better defined as sub groups of "alike" instruments.
 
First step, does your track sound good? Is everything sitting in the mix where you want it ? Before bouncing it down make sure each channel is eq'd and where compression is needed is of course, needed. But, make sure that you have no effects, compression, limiters etc on your post mix. Otherwise your engineer will be trying to polish a turd so to speak.
 
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